SSD and mapped network drives

[Lazarus52980]

On my system at work that runs an Intel 320 series 80 GB SSD, whenever I reboot my machine, I get a message that it was not able to reconnect to some of the network drives. When I open explorer, all 6 of my network locations have the red X on them. However, I can double click on them, and once I go in the first time, they are good until I next reboot my machine.

The only conclusion I can come to is that the system is booting faster than the network drives can connect. Is this true? If so, is there anything I can do about it? It's a minor annoyance, but I would like to fix it if I can...

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Coup27]

This has nothing to do with SSDs and is purely a Windows 7 (and maybe Vista) problem. At work my small office has a NAS drive and all the machines with Windows 7 have this problem.

The problem is Windows 7 does not automatically connect to network drives. There is a registry hack you can do to prevent the taskbar notification popping up but you still have to manually "connect" to each drive through my computer before any shortcuts or network addresses will work.

Royal PITA but I have not found a way to make W7 auto connect to mapped drives like XP did. If you Google it you will see it's a pretty widespread problem.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I haven't had this problem with my NAS. Are you mapping a network location to drive letter, or just adding a network folder? (I map network locations to drive letters.)

 

[Coup27]

I map network folders to drive letters on each PC. I've had this problem on multiple configs with the common denominator being Windows 7.

 

[cleberpinto]

I have the same problem on my PC in company. Recently I switched to SSD and constantly occurs this error message on the network map.
It seems to me that Windows loads the network mappings before finishing the loading of the network connection and that has caused this problem.
Because the speed of the SSD read and write, the boot is faster front other dependencies, such as checking and network connection.
The solution is change windows´ registry to make load the first connection to the network and then load the mappings.

 

[Elganja]

I have the same issue... but sometimes it does randomly connect correctly.

I've gotten used to just clicking on them in windows explorer, after reboot 🙁

 

[Zxian]

I had this issue at home as well. You're correct in guessing that your SSD is too quick for your system. 😀

Windows is essentially trying to access the network drives before the Network Connections service has started. A simple solution is to use a startup script to wait a set amount of time and then map the drives. If you use a non-persistent map, the drives will be dropped when you logoff, making the whole process cleaner.

I'll see if I can post the script here when I get home as well as the steps I took to get it all working. 🙂

 

[obidamnkenobi]

My win 7 machine has the exact same behavior and I don't have an SSD. I have it mapped to a drive letter.

 

[Veliko]

This has nothing to do with SSDs and is purely a Windows 7 (and maybe Vista) problem. At work my small office has a NAS drive and all the machines with Windows 7 have this problem.

The problem is Windows 7 does not automatically connect to network drives. There is a registry hack you can do to prevent the taskbar notification popping up but you still have to manually "connect" to each drive through my computer before any shortcuts or network addresses will work.

Royal PITA but I have not found a way to make W7 auto connect to mapped drives like XP did. If you Google it you will see it's a pretty widespread problem.

Interesting. I've seen this at my company, who are slowly rolling out W7.

I never realised it was a general W7 issue.

 

[Coup27]

Interesting. I've seen this at my company, who are slowly rolling out W7.

I never realised it was a general W7 issue.

I think the way out is to find a small one line script which will automatically connect to the mapped drive on start up and place it in the scripts folder.

I actually have a script which does something similar on another machine I ripped from somewhere so I know it can be done.

 

[Compman55]

If you add the mapped network drive to the group policy under a domain environment it will work every time. In a workgroup environment it will be flakey.

 

[Icecold]

Just do a batch file that has the following lines and put it in your startup folder (modify the share name obviously)

ping -n 20 localhost >nul
net use z: \\server\sharename /persistent:no

First line pings localhost for 20 hops and outputs to nul (essentially pauses for 20-ish seconds to give your NIC time to initialize), second line adds the network drive.